Arima's Forum Posts

  • I would love to have a button to collapse all the groups. I use dozens of them and it would be very handy to have one button that could collapse them all instead of manually having to collapse them one by one to keep things easy to scroll through.

  • Actually, Maya is very well designed. It's clever, the UI is still pretty good even though it's over 10 years old now and you can do so fucking much in it. Node-based design, it's very expendable, you have MEL or Python as scripting languages, its polymodeling toolset is halfway decent, the mental ray integration isn't too bad...

    It's a matter of opinion. For what it does (which is quite a lot), perhaps it is well designed. But for the artist, I have to disagree - it's like trying to paint using a calculator. Of all the graphics programs I've tried, even the buggy ones, I dislike Maya by far the most. Especially when hidden invisible nonsensical features show up, like one that my teacher warned the class of. But again, it's my opinion, and I respect anyone else's opinion if they like it.

    [quote:2bmet845]Arima: What are you using instead now? I have to switch back to Max in a couple of weeks, I'll probably miss my Maya config, but Max has a much better modeling toolset anyway - especially with release 2010 (polyBoost integrated, yay!).

    I like Carrara a lot, though it is quite limited in comparison to other 3d packages. It's not powerful enough for anything serious like a movie or a tv show, but it can mostly do what I want, and most importantly, I find it both easy to use and easy to get the results I want. If you're already comfortable with Maya/3DS Max, I doubt you would like it very much.

  • Like he said, there was an episode of top gear where they got tractors, and one of them had so many features and gizmos it took one of them like an hour to even turn it on. That's what some 3D programs are like. It's got wheels and a gas pedal, but that sucker is no car, and nowhere close to as easy to use.

    Choice of 3D software makes a huge difference on your workflow. Maya, for all its incredible capabilities, is worthless to me because it's ridiculously hard to use. I took a class on it and can't understand what they were thinking when they designed it. I've used a lot of 3D programs, and finding one that's easy to use (or one that you can even use at all) makes a huge difference.

  • At the moment we can get the RGB values of a pixel, but we can't get the alpha. Could that be implemented?

  • You could also have a shadow object that would tell the x/z and the distance between the sprite and the shadow the y. If you don't want a shadow you could make it invisible.

    Also, there's a command dist(x, y, x2, y2) that gets the distance between two points.

  • Adventure games, I think, have more untapped potential than any other genre. However, they seem to have gotten stuck in the 'guess what the developer wants you to do' rut. It's like reading a book and not getting to read the rest of it until you guess what the character's supposed to do. And in some games, if you guess wrong, you have to reread a few pages.

    Lame.

    I think the solution is that adventure games shouldn't rely so much on 'use item with something else' to continue, AND they should do it better when they do. Look at Zelda. You see a cracked wall, what do you do? Everyone knows you use a bomb on it. What makes it interesting are times like in link to the past, that one wall that you could bomb, but there didn't seem to be any way to get to it because of a gap in the floor.

    The important part is that it wasn't necessary at all. The game didn't stop there if you couldn't get to it, but you were rewarded if you could - and you were driven crazy if you couldn't, which would make you want to get to it more.

    Adventure games are practically made ENTIRELY of game-stoppers. That's not fun. Or really a game. I suppose you could call it a guessing game, but there's no element of skill, and the actual gameplay isn't fun. All the witty writing in the world isn't enough to make up for bad gameplay, and that's why I think the adventure genre tanked.

    Summary: For adventure games to improve, they need to have gameplay other than guessing what to do, because not knowing what to do next is high on the list of gamer gripes, and making a game based on that is ridiculous.

  • I make cutscenes by having a global variable that controls everything else and base events with everything running in sub events. So, if the variable equals "action" then the play controls work, etc, as they're run as sub events, and if the mode is cinema, then it automatically deactivates everything and all the subevents under the action base event run.

    Then I use a second variable for which scene to play. So it looks like:

    If global value is "action"

    • controls, etc

    If global value is "cinema"

    • If scene is "intro"
    • - cinema code

    Forgot to mention, I also use another variable to determine what step of the cinema it is. So if step = 1, move sprite to sprite.x+(500*timedelta). If step =1 and sprite.x is greater than 500, add 1 to step.

    Doing it this way makes cutscenes very easy to make because you don't have to worry about any of your gameplay code interfering with the cinema code.

  • And as I mentioned in the other thread: Gradius V. One of the best games ever, in my opinion.

    Part of what it does really right, is it constantly taunts you to get better. When you first start playing, you're like, wtf?? This is insane! And barely make it through 3 levels. Then it gives you an extra continue (adds 1 to the total), so you give it another shot. After trying a couple more times, and getting further each time, you get another continue. Eventually, you can beat the game either by improving or getting unlimited continues (when the total reaches 10, I think).

    But the best part of it is while you're playing, it adjusts the difficulty in real-time based upon how well you're doing. So it's like an insult when the game tones reduces the difficulty. The game is only about 50 minutes long, but I've played it for probably at least 200 hours.

    Subscribe to Construct videos now

  • I beat battletoads. The difference there was I found battletoads to be fun, even if it was ridiculously hard. Hard doesn't mean not fun. One of my favorite games, gradius V, is STUPID HARD on the higher difficulty levels, but the harder it gets, the more fun it gets when you can't believe you survive something.

    But that dragon's lair - yikes.

  • Yeah, well, MY hosting's got lotsa spiffy badges too! ->http://www.aplus.net/why/web-hosting-awards/ And MORE of them! So it's BETTER!

    (kidding, kidding)

  • I highly recommend aplus.net. 200GB storage/2000GB transfer for 7.50/month and great service. I've used them for years.

  • Couldn't you put the minimap in the layout you want it to map and use a layout object to display that layout?

  • Try Construct 3

    Develop games in your browser. Powerful, performant & highly capable.

    Try Now Construct 3 users don't see these ads

  • There's any number of reasons for a floating frame rate (background apps, etc), but I'm interested to know what people's thoughts are too. I have a new computer with barely anything on it except construct and a few graphics apps, yet a blank .cap at unlimited has the frame rate float anywhere from 1000-500fps. I know, I need a new graphics card. Part of it is aero, but even turning that off, tho it improves the frame rate, it still varies quite a bit.

    Edit: forgot to mention I get about 3000fps if I make a very very small app, so it shouldn't be any background processes using the cpu that are affecting it that much (and I tried to turn them all off).

  • Thanks!

  • I'm making an RPG.<img src="http://www.refractivegames.com/battle_files/screen3.png">

    Here's the teaser: http://vimeo.com/3607637